I’ve spent the weekend watching from sidelines as the Canned US Attorney story picks up momentum. And it’s been a couple days of interesting reading. Kevin Drum has it right when he flags this as the weekend of copping to the lesser offense to try to head off a real investigation.
That’s what the White House is doing, admitting that, yes, they mishandled the whole attorney firing and yes they signed off on it. But they really didn’t have anything to do with it and anyway it was just to clear out a few US Attorneys who weren’t addressing the administration’s law enforcement priorities.
And now we have the august Sen. Domenici (R-NM) coming clean about jawboning US Attorney Iglesias for information about the investigation of the New Mexico Democrat. He’s awfully sorry about it. But it’s wholly unrelated to Domenici’s request to the Justice Department that Iglesias be fired.
Coincidence is a bitch.
One thing you can say about the US Attorney scandal is that it just draws folks with bad luck to it like moths to a flame. First you’ve got the White House, 
not knowing Iglesias had been jacked up by state Republicans for not indicting that Democrat before the election when they went ahead and fired him for completely unrelated reasons.
And then you’ve got Domenici having this lapse of judgment calling Iglesias when he was trying to get him fired for completely unrelated reasons. With luck this bad you can imagine a lot of other really unfortunate coincidences cropping up over the coming days and weeks.
In all seriousness, the most humorous and telling part of Domenici’s and the White House’s attempts to get out in front of this doozie is watching them rummaging around for policy and management rationales for these firings.
Let’s listen to Domenici …
During the course of the last six years, that already heavy caseload in our state has been swamped by unresolved new federal cases, especially in the areas of immigration and illegal drugs. I have asked, and my staff has asked, on many occasions whether the federal prosecutors and federal judiciary within our state had enough resources. I have been repeatedly told that we needed more resources. As a result I have introduced a variety of legislative measures, including new courthouse construction monies, to help alleviate the situation.
My conversations with Mr. Iglesias over the years have been almost exclusively about this resource problem and complaints by constituents. He consistently told me that he needed more help, as have many other New Mexicans within the legal community.
My frustration with the U.S. Attorneyâs office mounted as we tried to get more resources for it, but public accounts indicated an inability within the office to move more quickly on cases. Indeed, in 2004 and 2005 my staff and I expressed my frustration with the U.S. Attorneyâs office to the Justice Department and asked the Department to see if the New Mexico U.S. Attorneyâs office needed more help, including perhaps an infusion of professionals from other districts.
This ongoing dialogue and experience led me, several months before my call with Mr. Iglesias, to conclude and recommend to the Department of Justice that New Mexico needed a new United States Attorney.
Okay, so Sen. Domenici has been feeling for years that federal caseloads have been too heavy in the state. And the prosecutors and the judiciary both needed more money. And the senator’s been trying to get them more resources. And when he talked to US Attorney Iglesias about it, Iglesias agreed that they needed new resources. But as he was making these efforts to bring in more resources “public accounts indicated an inability within the office to move more quickly on cases.” He brings this up with Main Justice and this “ongoing dialogue and experience led me, several months before my call with Mr. Iglesias, to conclude and recommend to the Department of Justice that New Mexico needed a new United States Attorney.”
Now, if I’m reading this right, Sen. Domenici is saying that Administration Story #1 — poor performance on the job — actually is the reason that Iglesias got canned. He doesn’t allege any policy differences, any deprioritization of immigration or drug arrests. Iglesias just couldn’t get the job done, even as Domenici was getting more federal dollars for justice in New Mexico.
So Domenici and the administration can’t even get their explanations straight. Or maybe Domenici is just having a hard time keeping up with the pace of the story since ‘poor performance’ on the job went down the memory hole a few weeks ago.
And of course Iglesias’ performance reviews appear to show no signs of any of this. And indeed, the best Domenici can seem to do is point to “public accounts” of the poor performance of Iglesias’s office. So like the rest of the explanations of poor performance and policy disagreement, this was an instance of poor performance no on else seemed to know about, notwithstanding the aforementioned ‘public accounts.’
In truth, the accounts provided by administration sources for the firing of various prosecutors are similarly wispy and contradictory. Read the Times article from today and the list of proferred reasons is simply all over the place. No one on the administration side even seems to have been able to come up with anything specific on Nevada US Attorney Daniel G. Bogden. About him the Times reports that “Justice Department officials said they regarded Mr. Bogden as competent but insufficiently aggressive, although they acknowledge that his removal was a tough call.”
Now, here’s one last point I’ll conclude with. Tough calls come in cases where decisions need to be made. I’ve got three great job candidates but only two jobs. Someone’s got to be cut. Tough call. Or I need to open up seven US Attorney slots. So I’ve got to find seven to fire. Has to be someone. And maybe Bogden was right on the edge. Tough call.
But no one had to do any of this. We’re supposed to believe that some senior officials at DOJ got together last December and pulled together a list of US Attorneys who weren’t in sync with administration law enforcement policy priorities. They came up with the names of six who had to go. Then they took a look at Bogden. They didn’t find any reason for complaint on policy or competence grounds. But he seemed “insufficiently aggressive” so he was out too. But it was a “tough call”.
I’m sorry. None of that adds up. Even setting aside the Iglesias smoking gun and perhaps more to come, the administration’s story, simply on its own terms, collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.
